Marketing January 20, 2015

Social Media: Is it plagiarism or is it innovative?

The digital age where social media has become a huge part of our generation, the opportunity curve is going through the roof for the guy/girl next door becoming famous overnight over an uploaded video, tweet or instagram post.

My Facebook feed had this one article that was being shared over and over again by different people and even made it to a few of my whatsapp group conversations. A YouTuber becomes famous and some of the videos have a word for word resemblance with another YouTubers videos. Some viewers feel cheated and have shown their outrage via YouTube comments, twitter and other social platforms. Everyone has their opinion on whether this is unethical or not. If you ask me, before judging someone online for copying another persons content and resorting to cyber bullying take these points into consideration:

If you believe someone has done something unethical, being unethical back (ex. cyber bulling) does not make things right
The person copying others online content may not be aware that this is even wrong (or not allowed) and may not know that they should be giving any kind of credit to the person they were inspired by or copying (if that’s the case)
Person may have seen creating the copy of the video as their own variation of it

[Tweet “Fame = many responsibilities & few understand these responsibilities right away..”]

You can learn from making mistakes and either correct or continue to do the same and ignore all negative feedback from your fans and only take the good. Although if you ask me, any kind of criticism, especially bad, can be really good for you if you take it with a grain of salt and use it to build your online image into something even better. After all, if you win all of your fans hearts, it only feeds into your popularity even more. It can even be inspiring to other content makers and they may even follow suit.

Here are some guidelines to follow when sharing or creating content on social media platforms:

Twitter

On Twitter when you share someone’s tweet it’s called a Re-Tweet. Click on the Re-Tweet button under the Tweet.

You can also start a new tweet and start the copied tweet with ‘RT’ which is short form for Re-Tweet. When you tweet this way don’t forget to also add the person’s Twitter name. Should look something like this:

This is a great way to give the other person credit on Twitter and also you’re engaging with the user. That user might even appreciate you giving them credit and mentioning them in the tweet that they may even Re-Tweet your tweet. Especially if you added your own comments to the tweet.

Facebook

We are able to easily ‘share’ a post on Facebook by clicking on the share button. When you share a post, viewers of the post can see where that post derived from. (Facebook page, Facebook user, outside Facebook source)

Instagram

There are a lot of ways you can give credit to Instagram users you’ve either been inspired by or just want to copy the exact image and post it on your account.

Download a reposting instagram app (Ex. App called Repost for Instagram on Androids) Apps like this will automatically add a side bar with the repost symbol along with the original content creators name.
You can tag the person in the image before posting when in edit mode
You can also mention the original image post-er in the edit mode: #regram @piperlime

Vine

Vine has a one button share option or just like Instagram you can use a hashtag like #revine.

Tumblr

This microblogging platform and social networking website also allows you to press a button to share or use hashtag #reblog.

YouTube

On YouTube it’s a bit more tricky because there are no share buttons and most YouTubers videos are not their own original content. YouTube doesn’t have the processes in place like other social platforms to encourage users to give credit. It’s kind of like a free for all. Built up of so many videos that tell the same story by different people/characters. It’s evident in beauty channels with similar looks being created by different beauty experts, comedians with the same punch lines, tutorials teaching the same technique and more. It really comes down to the YouTuber. Do you want to give credit to the content that was created by another that inspired you to re-create? Or would you rather just create the video and put it out there because it’s different enough that you’re in it? How about the fact that the video you created is different in your eyes because you had a different approach, a slight change in the story, different technique…innovative?

Plagiarism is the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.

With a platform that doesn’t give you the option to tag, share or promote to give shout outs to those who inspired you to create your content, it’s no wonder why there are so many copy cats. Not everyone has come to accept YouTube for what it is. Some viewers demand and criticize YouTubers to admit or share who they copied or were inspired by. However you will rarely read or see a YouTuber mention where they got their content from or who they were inspired by. Everyone wants to be an original, some with little to no effort. To each their own.

Marketing March 27, 2014

Twitter: What’s NEW

Just as soon as people started thinking Twitter was behind in its game, news sprouted up from social media channels about Twitter growing. At the moment Twitter has 241 million active users and it hasn’t been growing as fast as Facebook, Vine and YouTube. Time to play catch up?

Here’s a run down of what to expect and what has already popped up in Twitter News:

Last week Twitter rolled out a new platform for hosting video that gives iPhone and Android phone users previews of video clips in their feeds. With a single click you’re able to play the clip. This new feature on Twitter is called in-line video. You can see this feature being used on Vines. Twitter was behind in the video category and it was about time they started focusing on it.

It has been reported that Twitter is experimenting with the capability to see how many people have viewed your tweets, which at the moment only advertisers can see. The view count would be shown underneath each tweet, similar to how Facebook shows the amount of views underneath each Page post. How exciting is that?!

Tweet views will measure the reach of your tweets and help individuals and companies to recognize what they need to do or keep doing in order to get Re-Tweets and Favourites. Lots of views but no engagement says a whole lot to Social Media Managers. Fingers crossed this ‘experiment’ pulls through and every Twitter user can start benefiting from the data.

Twitter has also announced an update to its mobile apps that would give users more options when posting pictures. Many people on Twitter have already called Twitter out as copying Facebook because they changed the famous ‘Re-Tweet’ lingo to ‘Share’. I’m not a fan of changing the Twitter language, especially when so many users have gotten the hang of using RT. It’s one thing to expand, but changing something that isn’t broken. Not cool.

Why did @Twitter take out ‘Retweet’ and put ‘Share tweet’..?

— Orochimaru. (@Mitha07) March 26, 2014

There was another update to twitter mobile apps that would give users more options when posting pictures. One being the ability to tag up to 10 people in photos without lowering the character count within your tweet. Also, users will be able to post up to four photos in a single tweet and join them together like a small collage. Sounds like Instagram to me.

In-line videos, with one click view like Vines, yay or nay? How can ‘tweet views’ help you or your business? Will you use the new picture features?

Marketing February 25, 2014

Facebook+Whatsapp sitting in a tree…

Have you heard? Facebook and Whatsapp are getting married

When I first heard about this I wasn’t surprised. I was attending Social Media Week in New York as the SMW Reporter and had been in a seminar with BuzzFeed’s CEO & Founder Jonah Peretti. He was being interviewed by Toby Daniels Founder & Executive Director of Social Media Week.

When Toby asked Jonah about the future of sharing, that was when my ears perked up. Jonah went on to explain that he was starting to notice that their very popular BuzzFeed articles and quizzes were being dark shared and that people were starting to share less on Facebook and more across messaging platforms. Now, when he said this I got excited. It’s so very true. I have numerous amounts of Whatsapp chat groups and know that almost each group has a few shares a day with me. As a matter of fact, I’ve received BuzzFeed quizzes from friends in groups on Whatsapp too. There’s a steady shift between people wanting to share with articles, images etc with the masses to personalized and grouped sharing. Maybe Google was onto something with their Google+ selective group sharing capabilities.

It was all coming together in my head. When Jonah mentioned dark sharing. Many people in the audience at Social Media Week were boggled by the term. Had no idea what it meant. Thank you Toby! He jumped on it and asked Jonah to explain it further.

Dark sharing is a referral source that you see but has no exact source of where that traffic came from. So people who share via Whatsapp, BBM or other messaging services – their shares are not shown to BuzzFeeds analytics team. Right now BuzzFeed see’s that 20% of traffic is dark.

Marketers, advertisers and social media people of the world are thinking the acquisition will bring ads, change the platform, increase the cost of using the service, but no one has thought about behind the scenes benefits for Facebook. It’s the information of sharing that really matters to digital companies right now. That is where the future is.

Did Jonah know something before everyone else? Does he have a crystal ball that showed him the future Facebook acquisition? Or was it possibly an intelligent guess?

Let me know what you think with your comments below.